The helpful ladies and their male assistants had just succeeded in producing that amount of confusion among the articles on the spread table-cloths which was supposed to represent arranging the lunch,—and the call for volunteers to disarrange it more effectually with forks and fingers was about to be made,—when one of the gentlemen looked up suddenly as a shadow passed him.
"Our friend the Rambler," he said as the other, with a slight nod, recognized his notice and passed on down the plateau towards the thicket at the north-western edge.
"Why yes," said one of the ladies. "He walked and we rode, and yet he seems to have been up before us, for he is coming down from the farthest side of the mountain."
"Shall I call him and ask him to take a share in our dinner?" asked one of the male stewards.
"No, it would be useless: the Rambler, they say, generally chooses his own society, and he probably would not even thank us for the invitation," answered another. The strange man had by that time passed into the thicket bordering the edge of the schute at the right, and was seen no longer. Some of the pic-nickers noticed, as he passed, that he had no stick in his hands and that his almost invariable companion, the haversack, was missing from his side. But there seemed to be no occasion of commenting on so slight a matter, and nothing was said with reference to it.
It must be confessed that among those who had not contributed in any way to the spreading of the miscellaneous dinner upon the ground, were two persons in whom this narration maintains a peculiar interest—Horace Townsend, lawyer, and Margaret Hayley, gentlewoman. The lady had been among the early visitors to the swing; and at the time of the disappearance of the Rambler into the thicket at the edge of the schute, she was being swept backward and forward in the air by that dizzying contrivance, at a rate which sent her loosened wealth of dark hair and her light summer drapery floating about in equal negligence and profusion, while the dainty white hands held fast to the rope with a tenacity which showed them to possess a commendable degree of nerve, and the trim dark gaiter enclosing her Arab foot, and the spotless stocking that rose above it, had both just that measure of display which preserved the extremest bound of delicacy and yet made the whole spectacle strangely bewitching. Perhaps the extraordinary light in her eye as she swung may have been a little influenced by one of the two pairs of hands that supplied the careful impelling force; for those hands certainly belonged to the lawyer, who had been a member of the idle section from the beginning, while she had wilfully attached herself to it in spite of the expostulations of the Captain. That gallant officer, by the way, had been retained among the dinner-purveyors by the wiles and the threats of a little dark-eyed minx from Providence, who cared no more for him than she did for her shoe-lace, but who would flirt with him and make him flirt with her, because she saw that he was arrogant, shoulder-strapped, and very much afraid of being seen for a moment absent from the side of Margaret Hayley. The Captain, who was not quite fool enough to believe that he had really made a military conquest of the young Yankee girl, probably objurgated her in his heart for her charming impudence; while Margaret, more gratified by the relief than she cared to make manifest, may have made private calculations of hugging that dear little tormentor the first moment when she could catch her alone.
Such was the aspect of affairs—the young girl in the swing, Townsend and another gentleman swinging her, half a dozen merry young men and girls gathered around the trees or lying lazily on the grass, and the other and more industrious half-score kneeling and bending and squatting around the table-cloths at U. C. of the plateau,—when the arrangements (or mis-arrangements) were judged to be complete and one of the male members of the working-detail, a little hungry and disposed to be more than a little witty, made up one hand into the shape of a trumpet and bawled through it:
"Oh yes,—oh yes!—know all men and several women by these presents that the regal banquet is spread and that those who intend to eat are required to eat now or ever after hold their pieces—if they can find any to hold!"
A merry farce—the very incarnation of thoughtless jollity,—the dinner and the announcement. It rung out over the plateau, heard by all and certain to be heeded by all; to be succeeded the very instant after by a sound that no member of that company will ever forget until his dying day. A scream of mortal agony and terror that seemed to rise from the depths of the schute, nondescript in some respects, as unlike what any one then present had ever heard, but unmistakably human because the last sounds of every repetition shaped themselves into words that could be distinguished:
"Help!—help!—help!"